Eklog

Here’s a few tips to bear in mind now we have a new range of browsers.

Accessibility needs are becoming more important as a solution to giving cross-browser accessibility to everyone. It’s not just people who have accessibility needs, now it’s devices, or ‘thin clients’ which are having accessibility issues.

There’s some new rules for ensuring your web site works with browser zoom or in the new mobile browsers.

Phone browsers

There’s two new browsers in town: Apple IPhone and Opera Mini (testing on version 3.1.2). They shrink full websites down to a small screen size.

1. Css media=”handheld” is ignored by the iPhone and Opera mini browsers. They think they’re real browsers. Any style-sheet with media=”screen” will be rendered by these phone browsers.

2. Zoom isn’t a raster zoom. The text font size is reduced independently to the spacial elements. It should be reduced by exactly the same amount but it doesn’t always work perfectly.

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Testing and evaluating DHTML menu trees.

Each menu included in the list (below) has it’s own testing area. They’ve been tested for full functionality within a working ‘mini site’ and adapted to demonstrate whether it’s possible to open nested levels and display the current location without altering the body tag.

Here’s the list of menus with a link to the test and a link to the original sites:

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Rob Ballou’s (Style-switcher at Contrastweb.com) has published a clarification and improvement on Chris Clark’s (A List Apart PHP style sheet switcher). The Styleswitcher V2, allows you to give the user control over any individual attribute. Another good solution is the A List Apart PHP style switcher which is used in this site’s PHP tests section.

Sitepoint style switcher is another, more simplified method.

Invasion of the Body Switchers (IOTBS) from Brothercake is an efficient object-oriented style sheet switcher, which offers independent switching of multiple media types, and supports an unlimited number of options and controls. Alterior.net has also created a nice PHP solution.

The main area where style switching becomes really practical is for offering a print and visual impairment style. Another good application as would a fast download setting with minimal images and ornamentation.

This site’s main page has style-switching options in the top right corner. It gives the option of a liquid or elastic layout. There’s also a preview of how the print style will look (the print style needs updating – to include collapsible DIVs so the menu system doesn’t need to be printed yet the style can also be used as a ‘minimal images’ style.) A few site designs that were created in the past have also been included.